SOURCE: "The Major Impact of a Minor Poet," in Matthew Prior, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986, pp. 119-34.

[In the following essay, Rippy summarizes Prior's contributions to British literature and describes his influence on Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and other writers.]

This study began by asking the question raised by Prior's impressive monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey: in what sense may a so-called minor poet have made a major contribution to literature? Matthew Prior's contribution to British literature was a major one in at least four senses.

First, Prior produced a respectable body of literary work, in prose and verse, including effective and influential works in a number of genres: serious and mocking full-length philosophical poems, imitations of classical sources, a long amorous dialogue, tales, vers de societe, epigrams, epitaphs, lyrics, songs. A number of his shorter lyrics, mixing laughter and tears, are still often quoted and frequently anthologized.

Second, through the impressive financial success of the 1718 subscription edition of his Poems on Several Occasions, Prior established a direct connection between practicing writer and reading public without dependence upon an intervening patron. Earlier similar successful financial ventures had been made by Dryden with a translation of Virgil and by Pope with translations of Homer, but in both cases the subscribers themselves would have been hard put to say whether they were pledging their guineas to Virgil or to Dryden, to Homer or to Pope. Prior's 1718 edition was not a translation but a collection of his own work; subscribers were buying Prior. The edition was thus, in its conspicuous financial success, a milestone in literary history.

Third, in an age often treated as if it were monolithically dedicated in poetry to the heroic couplet, Prior wrote competently and well in at least six different line or two-line patterns: iambic pentameter in both heroic couplet and blank verse, octosyllabics both lyric and comic, and anapaests in trimeter and tetrameter, the last two of which he brought to a height they had never reached before. He arranged these lines, moreover, into avariety of stanzaic patterns besides couplets and blank verse—a modified Spenserian stanza, Horatian and Pindaric odes, quatrains, triplets, sestets—using the last three groupings as effectively as they had ever been employed in English, and in an astonishing variety of tones and approaches. He led the way for a Spenserian revival in the eighteenth century, and his other forms reminded the poets who followed him in the eighteenth century that there always existed workable alternatives to the heroic couplet form. Dr. Johnson, a reluctant witness for the defense, stated that it was Prior's variety that had given him his great reputation.

Last, Prior's writing exercised a marked influence upon the writings of the three most important literary figures of the eighteenth century—Swift, Pope, and Johnson—and upon a number of lesser figures in Great Britain and America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Prior's Influence upon Jonathan Swift

Prior and Swift had become friends as early as 1704,¹ for a letter from Dr. Francis Atterbury to Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, in that year indicates that Prior was in possession of either the proofs or an advanced copy of one of Swift's books.² Prior appears repeatedly in Swift's Journal to Stella, the first mention being in the entry for 15 October 1710.³ Swift and Prior were both members of the Brothers Club, which met in London every Thursday.⁴ Swift refers frequently to their dining, drinking, jesting, walking, quarreling, punning, reading their poetry, or planning political maneuvers together while Prior was in London. Later, when Prior began to be sent on secret missions to France, he and Swift corresponded.⁵ Prior arrived in Paris on 17 August 1712, and did not live in London for any lengthy period again until March 1715. Meanwhile, Swift returned to Ireland on 16 August 1714, and did not come back to England until March 1726, over four years after Prior's death. Thus, the last portion of their friendship was conducted exclusively by letter, yet the warmth of affection seems never to have cooled. Swift subscribed for four copies of Prior's 1718 Poems on Several Occasions and expended great amounts of time and effort in raising and collecting subscriptions to this edition, an activity that he continued even after Prior's death.⁶

From Gaulstown, Swift wrote to Archbishop King on 28 September 1721: "I am just now told from some newspapers, that one of the King's enemies, and my excellent friend, Mr. Prior, is dead; I pray God deliver me from many such trials. I am neither old nor philosopher enough to be indifferent at so great a loss; and therefore I abruptly conclude.… "⁷ On 25 January 1722, Adrian Drift, Prior's amanuensis and close friend, wrote to Swift from Prior's home in Duke Street, Westminster, of a ring "which you will be pleased to accept and wear in memory of Mr. Prior, whom you sodearly loved.… "⁸ On 3 February 1722, Swift replied to Drift that he would be "very thankful of a memorial of Mr. Prior, though I need nothing to make me remember him with all regard due to his merits, and whose friendship I so highly esteemed."⁹ When on 19 February 1729, Swift drew up his list of twenty-two acquaintances, "Men famous for their learning, wit, or great employments or quality, who are dead," Prior's name was included.¹⁰

Swift's friendship for Prior and his high opinion of him as diplomat and as poet exercised a profound influence on Swift's own poetry. F. Elrington Ball, the foremost twentieth-century critic of Swift's poetry, sees Prior as a chief influence on Swift's verse from 1710 on, teaching him "art and ease." Ball adds: "Of the power of Prior, to whom Cowper, Thackeray, and Dobson unite in giving pre-eminence in familiar verse, to impart such qualities, there cannot be question. Of the situation and disposition of Swift to receive them there can be as little doubt."¹¹ Sir Harold Williams in his more recent edition of Swift's poems states that "the unhappiness of Swift's life" was partially caused by the fact that his poetry fell short of that of his friends, Pope, Prior, and Gay, that Pope was his superior in verse while "Gay and Prior had a more lyrical gift."¹²

Occasional anonymous poems, such as "The Fable of the Widow and Her Cat," were attributed by some critics to Prior, some to Swift, and some to the two men jointly.¹³ Swift loved Prior as a man, deferred to him as a diplomat, and learned from him as a poet. Swift was writing tetrameter lines and vers de societe before the two men became friends, but Prior taught him to write them more gracefully and elegantly. Though the influence persisted throughout the last thirty years of Swift's lifetime, it was particularly marked in the period 1710-12, when the two politician-poets were frequently and intimately associated. Ball cites evidence of Prior's influence upon three of Swift's best poems of this period: two Horatian imitations (of the Epistle Quinque dies and the Satire Hoc erat) and the famous 900-line Cadenus and Vanessa. Even years later, when Prior's only contact with Swift was through letters, Swift, in the last four stanzas of "The Bubble," takes a statement that Prior had written him in prose about the South Sea speculation and expands it in verses influenced by Prior's own poetry.¹⁴ Prior's greatest gift to Swift as a poet, however, was not so much of specific lines, concepts, and echoes as it was of tone and style. Prior taught Swift a courtliness and ease of familiar verse that he had not hitherto mastered; it was a gift that Swift never forgot, either to practice or to repay.

Prior's Influence upon Alexander Pope

With Alexander Pope, a generation younger than Prior and Swift, indebtedness to Prior was much deeper and more specific.¹⁵ Few poetshave had a better opportunity to analyze another man's poetry from many sides than Pope did to study Prior's. Pope was young and avidly reading during Prior's period of greatest fame and survived Prior by twenty-three years, long enough to consider all his works. Pope and Prior had many mutual friends; they were also personally acquainted and for five years moved in some of the same circles. In preparing the 1718 subscription edition of Prior's Poems on Several Occasions and, in 1723, the projected posthumous edition of Prior's works, Pope read, in print or in manuscript, almost everything extent of Prior's—an unusually full grouping, for Prior had, as Pope later told Spence, "kept every thing by him, even to all his school exercises."¹⁶

The result of this close literary association between Prior and Pope was that the young Pope decided, more or less consciously, to make use of Prior in the same sense that, on a larger scale, he made use of Dryden. With each, he was focusing attention on a figure whose unusual merit both he and the public conceded without question. He formulated for himself a detailed analysis of the poetical virtues and limitations of each: his forte, his contributions, the relative merits of his individual pieces. Then, at certain key points, he set out first to emulate and then to surpass him. Later, he merely borrowed from him phrases or ideas that were particularly apt for his own purposes.¹⁷

Pope's earliest open competition with Prior on a literary theme came in versions of the "Adriani Morientis," the valedictory to his soul attributed to the dying Roman Emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D. Fontenelle, Prior's dinner companion in France, had published a French version of the poem in 1683; Prior's English version of the poem—"POOR little, pretty, flutt'ring Thing"—was included in the 1703/4 Dryden edition of Miscellany Poems and later, revised, in the 1718 Poems on Several Occasions, which Pope assisted in bringing out. On 12 June 1713, Pope wrote to John Caryll, senior, from London, enclosing Prior's poem and two by himself—"The Same by Another Hand" ("Ah, fleeting spirit! wandering fire") and "christiani Morientis Ad Animam."¹⁸ The first Pope poem is heavily influenced by Prior's; the second, an expanded and Christianized version, is most influenced by Thomas Flatman's "A Thought of Death." Caryll preferred the Christianized version, but for most modern readers Prior has won this particular competition. His version seems both closest to the spirit of Hadrian and most satisfactory as a poem in itself. Pope's versions seem elevated in diction but not improved.¹⁹

Four years later (in 1717) Pope again put himself into deliberate competition with a successful Prior poem, at least if we are to believe James Ralph and Richard Savage. In Sawney. An Heroic Poem. Occasion'd by the Dunciad, Ralph had written that Prior's Henry and Emma had "charm[ed] the finest Tastes" and that Pope had, in aneffort to compete with its success, created Eloisa to Abelard, with its "enamour'd, raging, longing Nun.… "²⁰ Pope retorted that Prior had himself praised Eloisa to Abelard in his Alma,²¹ but he never replied to the specific charge that he was attempting to outdo Prior with his Eloisa. The Pennsylvania-born Ralph had come to London with Benjamin Franklin in 1724 and was little better than a Grub Street hack; more significant testimony comes from Richard Savage, who had worked closely with Pope on the Dunciad itself and on its prefatory prose material as well. Sutherland has called Savage Pope's chief link with Grub Street during this period and his chief informant.²² Savage later told Dr. Johnson that Pope's poem had been motivated by Prior's, for Johnson wrote in his "Life of Pope" that "Of the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, I do not know the date. His first inclination to attempt a composition of that tender kind arose, as Mr. Savage told me, from his perusal of Prior's Nutbrown Maid. How much he has surpassed Prior's work it is not necessary to mention, when perhaps it may be said with justice, that he has excelled every composition of the same kind."²³ Though modern critics of Pope have not been inclined to take Savage's testimony seriously,²⁴ there is considerable external and internal evidence of Pope's indebtedness to Prior in this poem. Henry and Emma had first appeared in 1708, when Pope was twenty, and had gained instant popularity; moreover, it was to reappear in the 1718 Poems on Several Occasions, which Pope was helping to bring out. It was also a great favorite of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who exercised such a strong personal influence in Pope's maturing years that he liked to imagine himself in love with her, as he hints strongly at the close of Eloisa to Abelard. Lady Mary, as we have seen, was such an enthusiastically untiring admirer of Henry and Emma that she could recite the entire 773 lines by heart, even when she was old.²⁵ At least four times, lines from Henry and Emma are echoed in other poems by Pope—in The Rape of the Lock, Windsor Forest, The Dunciad, and Of the Characters of Women; there are also a number of less plainly marked parallels between Henry and Emma and other Pope poems.²⁶Henry and Emma was thus a highly successful poem by a renowned poet, and Pope may well have hoped to outdo Prior at his own game while profiting from the popularity that Prior had helped to build for the high-flown rhetoric of bitterly tested love.

Both Henry and Emma and Eloisa to Abelard are extended pieces of elegant amorous verse, concerning a pair of lovers already familiar to the English reading public. Thus the task of each poet was not to inform his readers of an amorous dilemma, but rather to present that dilemma with a pointedness and a polish that it had never before received—to tell what had oft been told before, but never so intricately, to exploit what Professor Tillotson has called an Ovidian geometry of amorous situation.²⁷ In both pairs of lovers the total attention is ultimately focused on the woman, the man playing not only a subsidiary part but an essentially unsympathetic one. Ineach instance the woman is subjected to a peculiarly sharp torment, in which a choice that at one point seems to be between love and reputation becomes no choice at all—at least, one in which sexual love is not an alternative. Emma finally is told by Henry that she must either part from him or follow him into the woods only to act as servant to his new love. Eloisa is repeatedly forced to remember that she is no longer free to choose whether she may love Abelard illicitly or not; the attack upon him has made it impossible for him to love her sexually at all. The only choice that the future can offer her, as Professor Tillotson has remarked, is complete acquiescence to her vows as a nun or death.²⁸ Thus in both poems the amorous dilemma is so painful that the woman contemplates with melancholy pleasure the prospect of her own death, somewhat comforted by the consciousness that she is to become a heroine of stories in future ages.

There are other resemblances in the structure of the two poems. Both poets use their fiction in order to plead a personal amorous cause of their own: Prior to Cloe (probably Anne Durham, as Professor Wright has shown²⁹); Pope, more obliquely, to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.³⁰ Both poems are also essentially speeches, the main body of Prior's piece being a dialogue between Henry and Emma, and of Pope's a reply to Abelard's letter in a manner that seems to be spoken rather than written.

Eloisa to Abelard incorporates at least two modified passages from Prior's "Celia to Damon,"³¹ but its greatest verbal debt to Prior comes from Henry and Emma. Of the eleven distinct parallels between the two poems, over half occur in the first third of Eloisa to Abelard (the first 122 lines), although there was no reason in the structure or subject matter of Eloisa to Abelard for Pope to resemble Prior less as his poem progressed. As Pope's poem grew under his hand, he seems to have become more confident of his own rhetoric and less dependent upon the Prior poem. Some of the more striking parallels are merely fitted into convenient places in Pope's poem, but others are altered by Pope in a manner that illuminates his poetical intention as contrasted with Prior's.³²

Pope's Eloisa to Abelard owes much to sources other than Prior's Henry and Emma, particularly to English versions of amorous epistles. Professors Root and Tillotson have established clearly that Pope was writing Eloisa to Abelard in the tradition of the heroic epistle, with his greatest single debt being to John Hughes's 1713 translation of the letters of Abélard and Héloïse.³³ Pope's debt to Prior, however, is also significant. Pope probably owed to him the original incentive for writing a female amorous declamation that would outdo the popularity of Henry and Emma. He owed to him some of the variations in general structure of the poem that differentiate it from Hughes's version of the letters, particularly the personal coda, considered by Tillotson "original, for an epistle,"³⁴ though corresponding in purpose exactly to Prior's personal prologue. Finally, he owed to Prior the verbal patterns of certain phrases, lines, and passages, which in Eloisa to Abelard frequently serve a new purpose but retain something of their Prior form.

As an effort to excel Prior at his own poetical game, Eloisa to Abelard is much more successful than Pope's Adriani Morientis had been four years earlier. Most modern readers would prefer Eloisa to Abelard to Henry and Emma, and even in Pope's own age Eloisa began to overshadow Emma. Eloisa to Abelard is more concise (half the length of Henry and Emma). Its ordeal has greater dramatic melancholy: Eloisa's dilemma is real; Emma's test is merely a trick known in advance by the audience. The rhetoric is more appropriate to the situation of Eloisa, who has had years in which to contemplate the various nuances of her amorous dilemma, whereas Emma is suddenly surprised by hers and should be active rather than verbal.

Another of Prior's long poems, Solomon on the Vanity of the World, heavily influenced another of Pope's major poems, the Essay on Man, written over a decade after Eloisa to Abelard. Solomon achieved a highly favorable response in its own century, being twice translated into Latin verse (by William Dobson and by George Bally) and once into German (by Simon Grynaeus).³⁵ Sixty years after the death of Prior, John Wesley praised Solomon, concluding "Now what has Mr. Pope in all his eleven Volumes, which will bear any comparison with this?"³⁶ On another occasion, Wesley described Solomon as "one of the noblest poems in the English tongue.… "³⁷ Earlier in 1782, the year that Wesley's essay appeared, William Cowper had called Solomon "the best poem, whether we consider the subject of it or the execution, that [Prior] ever wrote."³⁸ Pope himself apparently did not like the poem; he turned aside Prior's direct question about his opinion of Solomon by praising Alma instead.³⁹ Nevertheless, Pope's own Essay on Man is heavily indebted to Solomon, as it also owes lines to Prior's "On Exodus iii. 14" and his "Essay on Opinion."⁴⁰

There are some forty verbal parallels between Prior's Solomon and Pope's Essay on Man. These generally occur in passages concerned with brief and painful human existence, with the search for happiness, with man's reason and his passions, or with the animal kingdom. Prior and Pope also resemble each other in their treatment of two of the poetical-philosophical figures popular throughout the eighteenth century: the Great Chain of Being and the Ages of Man.

A comparison of Prior's Solomon and Pope's Essay on Man clarifies the nature, limitations, and merits of each piece as a philosophical poem. Prior's ideas in Solomon appear only in certain sections of the Essay on Man, but in these sections theresemblances are strong. That is, parts of the Essay on Man are very much like the Pyrrhonistic, pessimistic, sceptical philosophy of Solomon, but other parts are much more optimistic and sound much more like Shaftesbury than like Prior.⁴¹ Pope, in order to vindicate the ways of God to Man, looked closely at the worst aspects of human existence, then endeavored to explain reasonably how and why they were ultimately right. So long as Pope is examining the moral and physical evils of this world, he and Prior run closely parallel; but as soon as he begins to explain why these partial evils produce universal good, he and Prior diverge sharply. The only solution that Prior's Solomon can offer to human suffering is fideism—an acceptance by faith of a difficult universe and an inscrutable God. Pope, on the contrary, attempts to establish reasonably that those things that appear to be evil and unjust to man are not so when viewed in the whole scheme of things.

Because Prior's Solomon refuses to accept any rational way out, insisting that all things in this world are vanity and dust, it is both philosophically more consistent and poetically more tedious than Pope's Essay on Man. Dr. Johnson wrote in criticism of Solomon that "The event of every experiment is foreseen, and therefore the process is not much regarded."⁴² Because we know in advance that knowledge or pleasure or power will not long satisfy Solomon, we are held to the reading not by the interest of the framework of plot that Prior has provided but by the phrasing and individual ideas. Though these deserve more attention than the nineteenth or twentieth centuries have paid them, perhaps verbal purity and ideological precision are not enough to sustain over 2600 lines of verse. Prior's single theme of Pyrrhonistic philosophical belief, which he refused to relinquish in favor of any optimistic rational solution, has nevertheless continued to impress those who do manage to read through Solomon. George Saintsbury maintained that "If he had not Pope's intense craftsmanship, Prior … has something of the 'behind the veil' touch that Pope never even hints at."⁴³ This "something … behind the veil" in Prior's Solomon is the philosophical consistency that forced him to eschew any Shaftesburian hope of human benevolence and the rational rightness of the present universe and to retain instead the position of unresolved doubt which led Professor Spears to call him "a harbinger of future dissatisfactions."⁴⁴

Pope in the Essay on Man views the suffering and injustice of this world quite as clearly as does Prior and often in much the same terms. Yet, having taken this full look at the worst, Pope endeavors to establish by reason what Christian mystics sometimes perceive extrarationally: that all suffering and evil are part of a divine plan that will bring a unity of good from this apparent multiplicity of evil. Pope's difficulty is that he is trying to vindicate the ways of God to man by the very reason that he has elsewhere in the same poem asserted to be weak, fallible, presumptuous, and misleading. Thus the Essay on Man seems to shift back and forth between two incompatible positions—the Pyrrhonistic doctrine that man's reason is unable to cope with either the problem of God or that of the natural universe and the Deistic concept that man can do a fairly efficient job of dealing rationally with both.

The distance between Prior's and Pope's ultimate position is shown by their differing use of a similar figure to embody the human predicament. Prior in Solomon, 3:697, speaks of human existence as "Lab'rynths," as Pope calls it in the Essay on Man, 1:6, "A mighty maze!" Either figure suggests a complex puzzle, but one with a builder and a plan. Pope sets out to find this plan, asserting some ten lines later (1:16) that he intends to "vindicate the ways of God to Man." But Prior, painfully aware that he is neither Daedalus nor Theseus, never feels that he can see the plan of the labyrinth and instead finds himself (3:696-97) "unable to explain / The secret Lab'rynths of Thy Ways to Man.… "⁴⁵

Twice Pope imitated a Horatian ode already Anglicized by Prior. Both men imitated Horace's Satires, II, vi, which contained the account of the country mouse and the city mouse, Prior in The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd, Pope in the octosyllabic An Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace. In each case, the poet had a collaborator (Prior had Charles Montagu, Pope had Jonathan Swift), but the lines telling the story of the city mouse and the country mouse are believed by most critics to have been written by Prior and by Pope. The relevant lines in Pope's poem begin

 Our Friend Dan Prior told, (you know)
A Tale extreamly a propos:
Name a Town Life, and in a trice,
He had a Story of two Mice.⁴⁶

Despite this friendly reference to Prior, Pope's version of the same story owes to Prior's Hind and the Panther Transvers'd at most only three small details.⁴⁷ What the Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace may actually demonstrate is that both Swift and Pope learned from Prior's colloquial use of octosyllabics but that each man adapted his learning to his own gifts. Swift's colloquialism is straightforward and flexible; Pope's is brilliant, balanced, and perhaps a little rigid.

Both Prior and Pope translated Horace's Ode I, iv, which Ben Jonson had also translated. Jonson's version was called "Ode the First. The Fourth Booke. To Venus"; Prior's is "Cantata. Set by Monsieur Galliard" (1716); Pope's is "The First Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace" (1737). In general Pope's version is more like Jonson's than like Prior's, for Prior is not simply translating but iswriting words to be set to music, divided into five parts for recitative and arias.⁴⁸

The methods of Jonson, Prior, and Pope with this same Horatian ode offer an illuminating contrast. Jonson is cautious, fairly literal, somewhat rough, and powerful. Prior takes his material where it pleases him and suits it to his own purposes, creating a Restoration love-lyric that resembles Horace's farewell to love only in general outline. Pope follows Horace rather closely, though not so closely as Jonson, substituting for Roman geographical and amorous details equivalents more familiar to English thought or acceptable to English taste. Pope's version is as polished, easy, and elegant as Prior's but much closer to his Horatian original. In general, Jonson modifies Horace to make a more powerful metaphor; Prior, to simplify and generalize; and Pope, to polish and "modernize."

The influence of one poet on the next is slight; each seems to have worked primarily with the Horatian original. Prior shows no indebtedness to Jonson; Pope possibly owes to Jonson his verse form, but little else, and he owes to Prior only a single line ("Ah sound no more thy soft alarms"), the addition of Chloe, and the change of the beloved "wanton boy," Ligurinus, to a more acceptable girl (a shift explicit in Prior and implicit in Pope).⁴⁸

The problem of Pope's more general indebtedness to Prior is an intriguing one. When Edward Harley in 1723 asked Pope to read through all of Prior's manuscripts with a view toward editing and bringing out a comprehensive edition, Pope replied, "I now not only desire, but want, & long, to read the Remains of Mr Prior. My Respect for him living extends to his memory; & give me leave to say, In this I resemble your Lordship, that it dies not with his person."⁴⁹ Twice in the Dunciad Pope coupled Prior's name with those of major contemporary literary figures (Congreve, Addison, Swift) as the models of good writing against which the dunces were weighed in the balance and found wanting. In his last two years of life, when he was projecting a dictionary "that might be authoritative for our English writers," Pope listed Prior as one of the nine "that might serve as authorities for poetical language.… "⁵⁰ Three of these—Dryden, Swift, and Prior—were drawn from the Restoration-Augustan period, but Swift was restricted to being an authority for burlesque language only. Prior and Dryden had no such restrictions.

The question then becomes what Pope—who set out to become England's first "correct" poet—learned in general from Prior, one of his projected dictionary "authorities for poetical language." As an assistant in planning the 1718 Poems on Several Occasions and as the chief editor of the projected posthumous edition of Prior's works, Pope had dealt either casually or closely with almosteverything that Prior had written. Moreover, Pope had an extraordinary literary memory for lines of poetry read years before⁵¹ and a sharply sensitive personal recollection of the friends of his youth.⁵² In general, then, it is likely that Pope learned from Prior—or intensified because of Prior's tutelage—what Charles Kenneth Eves has called "that rococo style which pointed directly to the Rape of the Lock."⁵³ Prior's deft placing of the floridly ornamental mantle of style upon subjects deliberately too small for it may have foreshadowed that same mixture of high style and low subject in Pope. The matter of a delicate and easy tone, which also has been suggested as a skill perfected by Prior and passed along to Pope, is another facet of the same question of style. To a young man aiming, like Pope, to become England's first correct poet, Prior had much to teach of tone and style.

In addition to teaching Pope a delicacy and ease of perfect light verse tone, Prior improved the heroic couplet which was to become Pope's masterpiece. Robert Southey commented that "For improving [the heroic couplet], too much has been ascribed to Waller, and not enough to Prior. From Prior, Pope adopted some of the most conspicuous artifices of his verse."⁵⁴ Nevertheless, though Prior improved the heroic couplet which Pope was to perfect, it was probably in matters of lightness, delicacy, and ease of tone that Prior had the most profound influence upon Pope.

Prior's Influence upon Samuel Johnson

Though the third great literary figure of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, disapproved of Prior and damaged his poetical reputation by a very unfriendly and unsympathetic "Life of Prior," he also learned from Prior in his own writings, particularly in Rasselas, which is heavily indebted to Prior's Solomon. Both works are elegant, serious narratives in which a young prince is attempting to make a choice of life, only to find one pathway after another leading to a dead end—or a minotaur. In both works the prince acts a little and talks and listens a great deal. Ian Jack has pointed out that both works employ a "remote, vague, and Oriental" setting, are heavily indebted to the Bible, and are basically "Christian satires on the lot of Man."⁵⁵ Though Johnson found Solomon tedious—"Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.… "⁵⁶—he also found it a mine of useful observations, a number of which he incorporated into Rasselas and into The Vanity of Human Wishes. All three works stand squarely, as Jack has pointed out, in the tradition of Christian pessimism, but Prior's specific three-fold division in Solomon of areas to be examined—knowledge, pleasure, and power—finds specific parallels in those questions that Rasselas and Imlac and Nekayah and Pekuah raise in Rasselas and in those goods that the poet finds it vain and dangerous to wish for in The Vanity of Human Wishes.

Prior taught the English poets of the eighteenth century more than matters of style and subject. Along with Dryden and Pope, he also taught them that it was possible for a practicing poet to support himself handsomely from his writings without dependency upon patrons if he would deal directly, in a businesslike fashion, with his reading public. All three poets used the subscription method to secure advances while they worked upon projects and hence to support themselves rather well with funds drawn directly from their potential readers. Prior died a wealthy man not because of his diplomatic career, which often proved a financial disaster, but because of the 1718 Poems on Several Occasions.

Prior's Influence upon Other Writers

Prior's poetry also exerted a discernible influence upon lesser poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England and in five other countries. Anne Finch, the preromantic Countess of Winchilsea, frequently mentioned Prior in her poems, in the most notable instance, a thirteen-line section of "The Nymph whose Virginheart thy charms have taught," calling Prior her Teacher and Master.⁵⁷

William Cowper reacted against Johnson's censure of Prior, and J. W. H. Atkins has praised Cowper as a corrective "with exquisite taste" to Johnson, who had condemned Prior's use of classical fable as insincere and missed Prior's "most subtle quality."⁵⁸ Oswald Doughty has shown the influence of Prior upon Cowper's light verse: "in it he continued Prior's vein of humour, though with less subtlety than Prior showed at his best, while he possessed also Prior's facility in rhyme and rhythm, when writing in the 'familiar style."⁵⁹

In this same period Prior's poetry was prized by three of the Wesleys: Samuel the younger, John, and Charles. John Wesley in his journal, letters, and sermons quoted from Prior some sixty times, more than from any other poet of that century and more than from any other poet of any age except Milton. In 1779 he printed Henry and Emma whole in the Arminian Magazine. Sixteen times the Wesleys' hymns incorporate phrases borrowed from Prior,⁶⁰ the most familiar being the third line of "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"—"While the nearer waters roll"—a direct borrowing from Prior's Solomon. Samuel J. Rogal explains the Wesleys' continued interest in Prior thus: "Either firsthand or by way of the printed page, the brothers discovered in this Augustan poet a model of perfection for eighteenth-century man: the scholar, the poet, the statesman whose Tory principles anchored him firmly to the trinity of God, king, and nation, and whose sense of loyalty allowed him to endure harassment and even persecution from an overzealous Whig ministry."⁶¹ Henry Bett argues that Prior also taught the Wesleys "Something of the freedom of their versification.…"⁶²

Prior likewise exerted a strong influence on a number of German poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wieland's Musarion was inspired by Prior's Alma⁶³; Friedrich von Hagedorn was praised as the "deutsch Prior"⁶⁴; Spiridion Wukadinovic has shown that in Germany Prior also influenced Uz, J. N. Götz, Herder, J. G. Struckmann, Fr. Justin Bertuch, and Gleim.⁶⁵

The Scottish pastoral poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) wrote his best pastoral occasional poem⁶⁶ in "Robert, Richy, and Sandy: A Pastoral on the Death of Matthew Prior"; in the poem Prior is praised as a satirist, wit, teller of poetic tales, and love poet, in whose work, "Nae word stood wrang."⁶⁷ Ramsay's most scholarly biographer, Burns Martin, has, in fact, called Prior one of the two strongest contemporary influences upon Ramsay's work, a model for his attempts at vers de societe.⁶⁸

In Ireland the nineteenth-century lyricist Thomas More owed a considerable debt to the earlier light verse of Prior, a debt pointed out by William Thackeray, and in nineteenth-century England, Prior's influence fell almost exclusively upon the Victorian writers of familiar verse, Thackeray among them. Thackeray defended Prior against the strictures of Dr. Johnson, calling his lyrics "amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems."⁶⁹ Brander Matthews named Prior the master of Praed and of Locker-Lampson, classifying all three poets as among the ten great writers of English vers de société.⁷⁰ Still another Victorian writer of polished, elegant verse, heavily influenced by classical models, William Johnson Cory, paid tribute to Prior in 1877 in a revision of his collection Ionica by titling his translation of a Greek mirror-epigram "In Honour of Matthew Prior."⁷¹ Cory's lyrics plainly show the influence of Prior.

In nineteenth-century America, Prior's influence is most apparent in the familiar verse of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote to Locker-Lampson from Boston, 14 January 1873, that. "My mother was brought up on the literature of Queen Anne's men & used to quote Pope & I am afraid sometimes Prior without knowing the length to which his vivacities sometimes went, I am quite certain."⁷² Holmes shows in his own verse a marked influence from Prior, though not from his bawdier poems.

Thus, throughout the eighteenth century Prior exerted a broad and significant influence upon British and German poets writing in many different forms: long philosophical poems either serious or half-mocking, Horatian imitations, tales, lyrics. Though his influence was still plainly discernible in Britain, Germany, and the United States throughout the nineteenth century, it was felt almost exclusively, especially in the English-speaking countries, in the one genre of vers de societe. Because the twentieth centurydoes not prize any of the forms in which Prior excelled, he has had little to teach it thus far, though he and similar writers may yet offer a particularly attractive alternative to irregular and obscure verse or to the laceratingly personal confessional poem.

Prior willed to those poets who followed him his immediate inheritance from the Restoration: gifts of lyricism and levity, of octosyllabics and anapaests. Like Swift, though not a rebel against Augustan poetic practices, by his use of other verse forms and other tones, he retained for poets the precedent of a nonpentameter, non-iambic verse in various moods. It is in this role that he had his major impact as a minor poet.

Even more than most poets, Prior lived in an age of transition. Just as he managed quietly to pass from the Whig to the Tory party when it became apparent that the country that he wished to serve had changed its allegiance, so he passed smoothly from the Restoration to the Augustan mode of verse when the muse whom he wished to serve shifted her taste. Horace Walpole commented that Prior as a politician "left his party, but not his friends"; so too in poetry Prior managed to retain (without any show of nostalgia) some of the Restoration language, lyricism, and levity, along with certain verse-forms popular during that earlier period. When Pope commented to Spence that Sir John Suckling, Sir John Mennes, and Matthew Prior all belonged to the same school of poetry, he was grouping three men whose style was often burlesque, anti-Petrarchan, familiar, and colloquial, expressing its easy informality in varied metrical patterns. It is to a considerable degree because of Prior that this school of poetry continued as a current within the mainstream of Augustan elegantly formal poetry, written in heroic couplets and highly serious in its estimate of itself. It is likely, moreover, that Prior's major significance in the late twentieth century is that he offers certain alternatives—in genre, tone, polish, style, approach—to the chief types of poetry that we currently practice. He may justly continue to claim that elaborate tomb in Westminster Abbey, at the feet of Spenser, on the grounds that what he meant to English poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he may once again come to mean to us.

Notes

¹ The most detailed study of Prior's relationship to Swift has been made by James Alfred Koger, "The Personal and Literary Relationship of Matthew Prior and Jonathan Swift" (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1971).

² Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland. Preserved at Welbeck Abbey (London: Eyre & Spottiswoods, 1897), 4:155. L. G. Wickham Legg conjecturesthat this book shown by Prior was probably A Tale of a Tub. Matthew Prior: A Study of His Public Career and Correspondence (Cambridge: University Press, 1921), 127, n.2.

³ Swift, Journal to Stella, 59.

⁴ Allen, Clubs of Augustan London, 78.

⁵ The first extant letter from Prior to Swift was written from Paris, 8 April 1713. Ball, ed., Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 2:18-19.

⁶ For a detailed account of Swift's share in this subscription edition, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 154-59.

⁷ Ball, ed., Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 3:103.

⁸ Ibid., 6:235.

⁹ Ibid., 236.

¹⁰ The list was first printed in Sir Walter Scott's "Life of Swift," in The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co., 1814), 1:359, later reprinted in appendix 17 to Ball, ed., Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 5:465-66. For documentation of Swift's high opinion of Prior as politician, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 6-7.

¹¹ F. Elrington Ball, Swift's Verse: An Essay (London: John Murray, 1929), 102-3.

¹² Williams, ed., "Introduction," in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1:xiv-xv.

¹³ Ball, Swift's Verse, 124.

¹⁴ Westminster, 28 February 1721. "I am tired with politics and lost in the South Sea: the roaring of the Waves and the madness of the people were justly putt together.…" Williams, ed., Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 2:378. Ball (Swift's Verse, 160-61) argues that the Prior letter produced the four stanzas in the Swift poem; Williams believes that the Swift poem produced the Prior letter (Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1:250).

¹⁵ For a full treatment of this question of the literary influence of Prior upon Pope, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope."

¹⁶ 211, Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:91.

¹⁷ For a discussion of four Prior epigrams that linked him in some fashion with Pope, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 376-405.

¹⁸ Sherburn ed., Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 1:179. Pope's contributions to the Adriani imitations are complicated by his love of mystification, for he redated and readdressed letters, substituted one version of the poem for an earlier one, and even wrote footnotes conjecturing about his own editorial practices. Norman Ault has unraveled many of the details of Pope's devious readjustments of fact and chronology in "The 'Hadrian' Poems," in New Light on Pope with Some Additions to His Poetry Hitherto Unknown (London: Methuen & Co., 1949), 60-67.

¹⁹ For a full discussion of these versions of the Adriani Morientis, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 406-32.

²⁰ Ralph, Sawney, 11-12.

²¹ James Sutherland, ed., The Dunciad, vol. 5 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1943), 28.

²² Ibid., xxv-xxvi. See also Sir Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope, English Men of Letters Series (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880), 126.

²³ Johnson, "Pope," in Lives of the English Poets, 3:105.

²⁴ See Robert Kilbum Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), 235, and Geoffrey Tillotson, ed., The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, vol. 2 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen & Co., 1940), 397. Tillotson's appendix N (pp. 397-98) is devoted to a consideration of Eloisa to Abelard and Henry and Emma.

²⁵ Elton, A Survey of English Literature 1730-1780, 1:63-64.

²⁶ For a full enumeration of these parallels and a more detailed discussion of the relationship of Henry and Emma to Eloisa to Abelard, see Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 433-65.

²⁷ Tillotson, ed., The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, 281.

²⁸ Ibid., 285.

²⁹ Wright, "Matthew Prior's Cloe and Lisetta," 9-23.

³⁰ See Tillotson, ed., The Rape of the Locak and Other Poems, 291-93.

³¹ Prior's 11. 9-10 become Pope's 11. 59-60; Prior's 11. 41-44 become Pope's 11. 45-48. See Rippy, "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 454-55.

³² For a detailed itemization and discussion of these verbal parallels, see ibid., 456-63.

³³ Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope, 94-99; Tillotson, ed., The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, 275-88.

³⁴ Tillotson, ed., The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, 288.

³⁵ For a fuller discussion of the reputation of Solomon, see chapter four.

³⁶ Wesley, "Thoughts on the Character and Writing of Mr. Prior," 600-3, 660-65.

³⁷The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 6:433.

³⁸ Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, 5 January 1782, in Hayley, ed., Life and Letters of William Cowper, 1:232.

³⁹ Ruffhead, Life of Alexander Pope, 482n.

⁴⁰ For a full discussion and itemization of the indebtedness of the Essay on Man to Prior's various works, see Rippy, "The Ways of God to Man': Prior's Solomon and Pope's Essay on Man," in "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 466-92.

⁴¹ See two articles by William E. Alderman, "Shaftesbury and the Doctrine of Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy 26 (1931): 137-59; "Shaftesbury and the Doctrine of Optimism," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy 28 (1933):297-305.

⁴² Johnson, "Prior," in Lives of the English Poets, 2:207.

⁴³ George Saintsbury, The Peace of the Augustans: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a place of Rest and Refreshment (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 57.

⁴⁴ Spears, "Matthew Prior's Attitude Toward Natural Science," 506.

⁴⁵ Comparing these two passages in the Essay on Man and Solomon, Professor Spears concludes: "Against the dominant rationalism and optimism of his age, Prior upholds an Anglican Fideism; he is, in a sense, a tragic figure, for without the calm certainty of faith he remains a Fideist manque." "Matthew Prior's Religion," 180.

⁴⁶ LI. 153-56, John Butt ed., Imitations of Horace with An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and the Epilogue to the Satires, vol. 4 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1939), 259.

⁴⁷ For an identification and discussion of these details and of the broader question of Prior and Pope as Horatian imitators, see Rippy, "'I Have Taken Horace's Design': Prior, Pope, and Four Horatian Imitations," in "Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope," 493-516.

⁴⁸ In two instances, Pope's Horatian imitations draw lines directly from Prior pieces other than his reworkings of Horace. In his Letter to Monsieur Boileau Despreaux: Occasion'd by the Victory at Blenheim, 1704, Prior had written:

 amongst our selves, with too much Heat,
We sometimes wrangle, when We should debate;
(A consequential ILL which Freedom draws;
A bad Effect, but from a Noble Cause:)
(11.191-94, LW, 1:226)

Pope makes the same specific observations upon the same English political situation in "The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated":

But Britain, changeful as a Child at play,
Now calls in Princes, and now turns away.
Now Whig, now Tory, what we lov'd we hate;
Now all for Pleasure, now for Church and State:
Now for Prerogative, and now for Laws:
Effects unhappy! from a Noble Cause.
(11. 155-60, Butt ed., Imitations of Horace, 209)

In the second instance, Pope borrowed a contrast from Prior's manuscript prose and turned it into a line of poetry. Pope had praised Prior's four manuscript Dialogues of the Dead to Spence, recalling the precise content of each, including "another between Montaigne and Locke on a most regular and a very loose way of thinking.…" (Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, 1:92). Into his "First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated," a decade later (1737), Pope incorporated the lines:

 But ask not, to what Doctors I apply?
Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I:
As drives the storm, at any door I knock.
And house with Montagne now, or now with Lock.
(11. 23-26, in Butt, ed., Imitations of Horace, 281)

⁴⁹ Letter of 24 August 1723, in Sherbum, ed., Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 2:193.

⁵⁰ Item #390, Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, 1:171.

⁵¹ Samuel Johnson wrote of Pope: "… he is said to have had great strength and exactness of memory. That which he had heard or read was not easily lost; and he had before him not only what his own meditation suggested, but what he had found in other writers that might be accommodated to his present purpose." Johnson, "Pope," in Lives of the English Poets, 3:217.

⁵² Pope wrote to Swift on 30 December 1736: "…I find my heart harden'd and blunt to new impressions, it will scarce receive or retain affections of yesterday; and those friends who have been dead these twenty years, are more present to me now, than these I see daily." Sherbum, ed., Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 4:51.

⁵³ Eves, Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist, 181-82.

⁵⁴ Robert Southey, "Preface," in Specimens of the Later English Poets (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807), 1:xxix-xxx.

⁵⁵ Jack, "The 'Choice of Life' in Johnson and Prior," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 49 (October 1950):523-30. J. W. Johnson, "Rasselas and His Ancestors," Notes and Queries 204 (May 1959): 185-88, cautions that "Johnson certainly received hints for Rasselas from reading Prior's Solomon … but despite striking similarities … there are several important differences between the 'plots', tone, and implications of the two works."

⁵⁶ Johnson, "Prior," Lives of the English Poets, 2:206.

⁵⁷ Samuel Humphreys, "Some Account of the Author: Memoirs of the Life of Mr Prior," in Poems on Several Occasions. By Matthew Prior, Esq; 4th ed. (London: C. Hitch & J. Hodges, 1754), 2:lxxii.

⁵⁸ J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Methuen, 1951), 323.

⁵⁹ Doughty, "The Poet of the 'Familiar Style,"' 5.

⁶⁰ Henry Bett, The Hymns of Methodism, 3d ed. (London: Epworth Press, 1945), 154-60.

⁶¹ Samuel J. Rogal, John and Charles Wesley, Twayne's English Authors Series, no. 368. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 102.See also two works by T. B. Shepherd: "John Wesley and Matthew Prior," London Quarterly and Holborn Review, July 1937, 368-73, and Methodism and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth Press, 1940).

⁶² Bett, Hymns of Methodism, 159.

⁶³ Johan S. Egilsrud, Le "Dialogue des morts" dans les littératures française, allemande et anglaise (1664-1789) (Paris: L'Entente linotypiste, 1934), 140.

⁶⁴ Spiridion Wukadinovic, Prior in Deutschland (Graz: K. K. Unicweaitats-Buchdruckerei und Verlags-Buchhandlung 'Styria," 1895), in Anton E. Schoenbach and Bernhard Seuffert, Grazer Studien zur deutschen Philologie, 4:7.

⁶⁵ Ibid., passim.

⁶⁶ Burns Martin, Allan Ramsay, A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 68.

⁶⁷ L. 103, in Burns Martin, ed., The Works of Allan Ramsay (Edinburgh and London: A. Fullarton & Co., [1851]), 2:176.

⁶⁸ Martin comments further, "we need hardly add that the Scot never achieved the polish and urbanity of his master." Ibid., 59.

⁶⁹ "Prior, Gay, and Pope," in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Derek Stanford (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 164. For specific instances of Thackeray's indebtedness to Prior, see William P. Trent, "Thackeray's Verse," in Longfellow and Other Essays (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1910), 182.

⁷⁰ Brander Matthews, "Familiar Verse," in Gateways to Literature and Other Essays (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912), 163-64.

⁷¹ William Johnson Cory, Ionica, introduction and notes by Arthur C. Benson, Sesame Library (London: George Allen & Unwin, n.d.), 218.

⁷² Letter quoted in full in Augustine Birrell, Frederick Locker-Lampson: A Character Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 96.